I completely agree with you Will. Tell you what.....you do what you want, and I'll do what I want.One thing I wonder.......do you treat all other purchases you make the same way....its not perfect, but hey, these guys did a hell of a good job to get it this far, so why bother improving it and fixing its flaws? Cause if you do, there's a certain bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell to you.....P.M. me if you're interested... :)I'd like to find out one thing from you Will. What sort of bug in FS would make you join the ranks of the "Self Important" among us and beg for a patch? Let's say for FS2006....is there something that you can think of that would make you email microsoft or email/call your developer friends on the phone and say "dudes, this simply must be patched...." You know, I have a strange suspicion that would never happen.But that's all right....we're all entitled to our opinions and beliefs, and I salute yours. BTW, "Self Important" was a nice touch. :)

Thank you David!Agreed.

LOL, why does it have to be a choice between "kissing Bill's feet" on the one hand and constantly whining and complaining on the other? Whats wrong with simply accepting the fact that few things in life and software are perfect and enjoying what we have? I don't think the hardcore FS community is an inconsequential market for MS and as has been pointed out they do respond to our requests occasionally. But lets face facts here - whenever topics like this come up, I see the same handful of people complaining about seasonal ctd's and autogen bugs over and over. I wonder how many here have actually experienced these issues without actively seeking them out after reading about them on the forums. I know I haven't. I've been running FS9 pretty much since its release and have experienced literally zero ctd's that I couldn't trace to some add-on install I'd messed up. And I would think I'd be considered a "heavy user." Whether or not MS decides to patch an issue in the sim has absolutely nothing to do with people on these forums saying they aren't in desperate need of one. Its entirely based on how many complaints they are getting sent to their customer service people. If some issue seems to be affecting a large number of people and those people are sending angry emails and making phone calls to MS, they'd likely take a look at it. If its affecting two dozen people on Avsim, they likely won't.

"As far as I have been able to assertain, the autogen issue only really occurs at the "extremely dense" setting -"Wrong. In theory, it occours on *all* settings and becomes very noticable at Dense and upwards." I mean theoretically, given a powerful enough PC, the issue will likely dissappear"The problem is that with default.xml and vector objects, framerate in a test flight I did dropped to 6 FPS. Without the vector objects and default.xml objects I get about 30 FPS under the same conditions. So, to completely eliminate the gap, it would take an 11 GHz AthlonXP. Anyone want to sell me one? Even if a 4 GHz P4 was enough - why should *I* spend hundreds of

I think most of us would agree that there are definitely issues in FS9 that could (and perhaps should) be fixed with a patch. The problem is that the decision to release a patch is made by the bean counters at MS, not the FS9 team. Obviously, there haven't been enough complaints to MS to make the bean counters (who likely spend absolutely no time browsing the Avsim forums) say "man I'm sick of hearing about this problem. Fix it." People love to bash MS (the assumption made by the "MS bashers" is that if only the evil MS empire weren't in the way, some other developer would be able to do a better job than they do. I'd love to see how bulletproof Linux would be if it were running on 95% of the worlds PCs and every pimple-faced basement-dwelling geek/troll hacker was taking dead aim at it) but the fact is MS has made a ton of money developing products that work well most of the time for most of the people - and that applies to FS9 too. It has a broad user base - most of which isn't nearly as hardcore and obsessive as we are. Its true that other sims like LOMAC and IL2 get patched. Its also true that the audience for those sims is much smaller, and much more heavily weighted towards the hardcore sim-head side of things. It's also true that there are more complex applications (video and sound editing software and so forth) that get patched regularly, but I'd argue that thats a response to corporate client complaints more than anything else. Personally, as I said before, I'm in the middle on this. I'd love to see a patch come out becuase patchs usually improve games. The reality though is that I doubt we'll see a patch so I am continuing to enjoy the sim a great deal whether there is one or not.

"Obviously, there haven't been enough complaints to MS to make the bean counters (who likely spend absolutely no time browsing the Avsim forums) say "man I'm sick of hearing about this problem. Fix it.""Well I'm sure people *have* complained about poor performance, it's one of the top issues people have with FS and I'm sure it will be a priority for FS2006. I'm also quite certain that CTD reports come in quite frequently. However, neither the guy reporting the problem, nor the support staff probably realize that it could be due to the default.xml objects (poor performance) or the seasonal CTD bug (the crashes). In most cases, the crashes and performance issues were caused by something else but in at least some of the cases they were probably caused by one of the known bugs in FS9 (the CTD bug, autogen bug or some other yet to be discovered bug)."The reality though is that I doubt we'll see a patch so I am continuing to enjoy the sim a great deal whether there is one or not."I'm not an MS basher, but this *does* have something to do with the fact that MS essentially has a monopoly on civilian flightsims. If there were 10 other, equally good flightsims out there, which received fixes and patches for all those nagging little issues, would you still continue to use FS9? Probably not, and even if you did, many others would jump ship. This would result in better flightsims because all companies would be forced to improve their sim to keep the customers. Now, it's OK for Microsoft to ignore complaints because we have no other choice than to use their sim.

Yep, all true. The fact that MSFS has such a broad user base is both a curse and a blessing. If it didn't, it likely would have gone the way of FLY, Flight Unlimited, et al. But the fact that it does means the hardcore community doesn't have as much influence over it. In the end, I think we have to accept a bit of bad with all the good becuase I don't see any other way for a sim like this to exist. We just aren't a big enough market to support a sim aimed directly at us I'm afraid so its up to us to make the best of the sim we do have...

>I'm not an MS basher, but this *does* have something to do>with the fact that MS essentially has a monopoly on civilian>flightsims. If there were 10 other, equally good flightsims>out there, which received fixes and patches for all those>nagging little issues, would you still continue to use FS9?>Probably not, and even if you did, many others would jump>ship. This would result in better flightsims because all >companies would be forced to improve their sim to keep the>customers. Now, it's OK for Microsoft to ignore complaints>because we have no other choice than to use their sim.I jumped from FS98 to Pro-Pilot for it's topography & and it's inclusion of a lot more (high altitude) airports west of Denver, Colorado. And then of course, I regularly condemned & joked about FS98 on these same forums.And with FS2000's problems, I combined it's databases into Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator, promptly junked FS2000, as well as getting a lot of use from the FLY simulator.But..................... despite some flaws in FS2002 and FS2004, I can rationally realize "all" that the simulation has to encompass. As far as I'm concerned, these two simulations beat all others, hands down at the moment, when it comes to the capability of "doing" so much.A comparison of 10 competing simulations amounts to nothing, because you'll never see them. X-Plane's going through so many changes, that new weekly versions are sometimes un-usable. FLYII still has many problems despite patches & aftermarket patches. Since a flight simulator, now has become a world simulator, as well as a plane simulator, I doubt you'll ever see much competition, as the requirements are now so much, and need to involve lots of 3rd party additions.And, as to the "Beta tester, **** kissing comments, from some on this forum, you know where you can put your head......L.Adamson ----- beta test FS9

"Since a flight simulator, now has become a world simulator"...Which reminds me:http://www.kehole.comAnybody ever seen this thing in motion? They have it at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Great stuff.Check out the movies.Not perfect for flight simulator, of course, but on the right track. You CAN find your house.

Dear Andrew,Well, sorry about the Turbo . . . when I moved down from NYC to Mississippi and began to raise horses, I needed a truck . . sold the Porsche and bought a Dodge Ram Dually Diesel, you can't pull a 6 horse trailer with a Porsche.and you are so correct, you CAN'T let kids walk to school any more, even if its around the block.Best to all,Clay

I have one thing to say.Take a look at windows. Same company, same buggy programming. Microsoft have decided that more releses are better then good software the first time. They release broken software due to market deadlines and then pretend like there is nothing wrong with it, until they release their next product. Which they then charge you for.So we have to wait until FS2006 to get the bugs fixed? Then we have to pay the $100 or so for the privelege of finding out what is broken in that release and pay for FS2008 and 2010 and so on. That's just microsoft, it has been that way since MS BASIC in the beginning. Bill is a business man first, software man second. It's not going to change while they have virtually no competiion and can run their little monopoly and buy and destroy competitor companies.I would love it if all the good freeware developers would turn around and go help Flight Gear get mature, it's open source and we can all have a go at making it better than FS200x.

All the rhetoric aside, and the sarcasm put away (I used up my share on the last post), the reason for no patch may be indeed a factor of economics.Many people feel that the reason that there is no patch, is because MS has a monopoly on the field. Critics cite that the most innovative version of Flight Sim to ever be released (FS2002) came not coincidently when there were no fewer than 3 other major competitors in the field. (Terminal Realities "Fly!" series, Sierra's "Pro Pilot" series, and Looking Glass' "Flight Unlimited" series.The painful truth is that the flight sim market is not large enough to support such an industry.Flight simulation and Space Flight Simulation has been one of the staples, since the first Apple 2 computer landed on desktops. I believe this is because at the time, Flight Simulators were one of the few Genre's that allowed the player to experience true first person action. You weren't some "icon" on a screen, you were actually in the cockpit. Flight Simulation appealed both the the hard core "simmer" and the action game junkie who wanted to feel really like he was "there".For a long time Flight Simulation ruled as the king of the game world. We need only to look back at the glory days when Combat Flight Simulators and Space Flight Simulators flooded the store shelves. The hardcore sim world also demanded that with each subsequent release, the games got less game like, and more "sim" like. We saw the release of very hardcore sims, such as Falcon 3, Jane's F-15, and Janes FA-18. While for the most part these games were technically amazing, they were overall financial failures because they had become too specialized for the casual gamer to enjoy. The learning curve had become to steep.Space Flight simulators were facing a similar problem in that they were suffering the "Wing Commander" syndrome in that almost every space combat simulator followed the same cookie cutter mission structure. Take off, fly to x y z waypoints, kill bad guys along the way, and land. Amongst all this, a new player entered the gaming world. The first person shooter. Now, Flight simulation was not the only game to provide the immersion of 1st person gaming. Games like Doom, Quake, Heretic, and countless others could now put the gamer, not in a cockpit, but right down to street level. The action junkies saw these FPS games as being much more viseral than space combat or combat flight simulators, and they were much more accessable too. Add to that, the fact that an entirely new title could be generated rather cheaply by simply changing some textures to create an entire new world. Thus a completely new game, with new local, new "feel" could be generated for almost nothing.Flight simulators, however, were stuck in the same blue sky, with the same "real world" enemies. In fact, the only thing that changed was the back story, which really didn't count for anything when you were up in the air.The days of flight simulations rule were numbered.At first, the software houses began to respond, by making their flight sims more "visceral". Instead of flying modern day jets with kills that could only be seen as a blip on the radar, or a puff of smoke. Flight Sim companies tried to respond with WW2 flight sims, that would create tighter close quarter battles. It's one thing to be scared by a missle launch, but quite another to be surrounded by swarming planes and actually being torn up by an enemy right on your six.It came to a head around 1989. Computer Pilot did an excellent article in their Jan 2004 edition about the death of the Combat Flight Sim. In Christmas of 1998 no less than 5 WWII based combat flight Sims existed. Each of these sims, were not cheap $10 ripoffs, but expensive A-title games from the "giants" in the field expected to bring in big dollars to their perspective developers. They were European Air War (Microprose) Combat Flight Sim (Microsoft) WWII Fighters (Janes) Fighter Squadrom (Activision) and Nations WWII fighter command (Psygnosis)All of these games were quality product, all of them had special features that made each one unique. However, not unique enough. They were all overwhelming economic failures.Why? Not enough simmers to go around. I imagine very few of us, even hard core simmers had all 5. I had One, and only recently purchase EAW for 5 bucks at EB games.Slowly, software houses began dismantiling their space and combat sim departments because the cost to make an "accurate" sim, were very high, while the financial return from these expensive games was minimal.After a veritable drought of games for the next 3 years, the civilian flight sim market began to heat up. Some people saw Microsoft's monopoly of the Civ Flight Sim market to be an untapped cash cow, and soon Pro Pilot, Fly! and Flight Unlimited began to crowd the civilian flight sim market. Again, with each sim being unique enough to seperate itself from it's competitor, but not unique enough to generate enough cash to keep their publishers from axing the series.Through all this, Microsoft has continued to dominate the civilian flight sim market.Perhaps the reason no patches get released from microsoft, is that they would rather see the game series continue. As a group of gamers, hard core sim fanatics are in a great minority. We alone are not enough to keep the sim alive. However, we do provide 90% of the input required to make it better."I'm happy with FS2002. It does everything I want, I don't think I'll buy FS2004." Those words must be the nightmare scenario in Microsoft. Microsoft will never want to produce the "holy grail" of flight simming, because once it is done, it will mean the end of the product line. Perhaps the reason that we don't see regular patches, is because of built in obselecense. Microsoft wants us all to buy the next version. We see it all over the free world. When's the last time someone patched the 'light bulb' to last longer. Light Bulbs are designed to burn out, so we will buy more light bulbs. Microsoft has nearly sole ownership of a very limited market. One way to keep that market is not to produce "the perfect product" but simply keep creating "better" product.The question we want to ask ourselves is this. Do WE want the series to continue? Do we see bi-annual releases as a good thing? (I say yes). Or would we rather have Microsoft create a flight sim, that will be regularly patched, but be the only Flight Sim to be developed for 3,4, or 5 years.I personally vote for no patch, and a regularly evolving product, vice a static product that while may be slowly "patched" to perfection, offers no real wow factor.It's true, other games are "regularly" patched, but to be honest with you, most patches have never had a noticiable effect on gameplay. Unreal Tournament 2004 has had several patches, and to be completely honest, I can't tell the the difference from the patched and unpatched product. The same would hold true for FS9. While the Winds Aloft, Autogen bug, and CTD, would indeed effect be a great fix, very few of us would realize it is there, if we weren't looking for it.Personally I would rather have MS spend it's resources to make a better overall simulation next year, than to make changes to the product that will have very little cosmetic impact in the current release.

Just to add to this here is a quote from the downloads page at Flightgear.org""Caution: Check the version numbers of the following prebuilt packages. There is usually a several day delay between the official source code release and when the ready to run binaries of the same version begin to show up here. ""Yes, days. So I here you say, "How do you know you are downloading a bugged version?"Well, you download the stable release if you want to be sure. If you want to check out the latest features, download the devel or prerelease version.The open source community do things this way, a version is frozen in features and only bug fixes can be added, while work continues on the next release, you can download either version, in fact you can download any version from version 0.0.1 to the one made last night! This is not magic and there is nothing stopping MS or other commercial producer doing this... except... Marketing departments, logistics, money and so on. It's done using Concurrent Version Control. In fact, you can download the development code, direct from the developers code servers and compile and run it yourself! You can watch files for chages, view the code changes immediately and decide if you want to patch your version with that code or not. You can even fix a few bugs while you are there and make your own patch.... and give it back to everyone else.If you download a version and it's got serious bugs, chances are when you go back to site, there will be a patch or fix, you can download the fixed version, FOR FREE!Why is it free? You want it don't you? The programmers want it. So the programmers write it for themselves and give it to you, in the hope that you might help the project out and return your work to them. Giftware.Linux isn't doing too badly, nor is Star/Open Office and the 1000s of other opensource software out there. In fact MS are scared, very scared of it. Why? Well, they can't buy it and destroy it, because there is nothing for sale!MS say it's against the american dream and is a cancer on capitalism.

PS: Who now "owns" Terminal Reality, makers of FLY!?Yep, Microsoft. They are writing XBox games. Funny that they abandoned the Fly Series isn't it?Can you see the business suits writting the cheques now?

Hi Will - Good post, but it starts to fall apart a bit because of all the "perhapsing"... and"Perhaps the reason that we don't see regular patches, is because of built in obselecense. Microsoft wants us all to buy the next version. We see it all over the free world. When's the last time someone patched the 'light bulb' to last longer. Light Bulbs are designed to burn out, so we will buy more light bulbs."So, Microsoft intentionally leaves problems in to get people to buy the next version, with its new batch of problems?I'm not sure what the CTD bug is - but the overcast, autogen, and winds aloft bug seems to be enough for people to notice, at least. Again, without firsthand experience with 2004, I haven't seen it in action. I certainly want to see the series continue, and may not buy 2004 while I wait for 2006; my current PC can't run it well anyway, from what I've heard. There seems to be a lot for 2002 I still haven't taken advantage of!I think that perhaps the irony here is that the work done "general audience" for whom cosmetic, fun, and training features have been included, may be taking up resources away from fixing things that should work.I don't need to see reflective underbellies, or fly a Sopwith Camel. But I would like things that address -flying- as a core of the system improved.I don't know what's planned for 2006, if anything - but I'm sure there will be some novel addition that takes resources away from whatever it is that won't be working...By the way, ever heard of fluorescent lighting or LEDs? ;)